A few months ago, we sometimes experienced that discussions in our research topics were sometimes a bit too ‘reactive’. A moderator posted a topic, enthusiast participants shared their opinion but then, the discussions tended to run down in some cases… A pity, because the real added value of community research is in the consecutive learning that appears when the moderator and the participants (amongst themselves) really start to ‘interact’…

After realizing the need for a feature that would boost interaction among the moderator and the participants, but also amongst the participants themselves, we did internally investigate and finally set up such a tool, based on the successfully applied mention principle on social media like Twitter and Facebook. The tool works as follows…

If a community moderator or a regular member mentions another community member in a topic post like this: @[username], the member in question will receive an automatic e-mail notification. This plain (generic branded) e-mail contains the name of the initiator, the name of the specific research community and the message itself. A direct link to the post triggers the mentioned member to react immediately on the online research community! This feature is available in every language which our research community platform currently supports. Our first experiences show that this tool really boosts the interaction and the activity on our research communities, which generates more (profound) insights!

It is a great example on how we keep taking our research communities forward. We constantly think how we can optimize and develop features on our platform that can really add value to our research!